Related papers: Spreadsheet Debugging
While scientists increasingly recognize the importance of metadata in describing their data, spreadsheets remain the preferred tool for supplying this information despite their limitations in ensuring compliance and quality. Various tools…
The hard coding of input data or constants into spreadsheet formulas is widely recognised as poor spreadsheet model design. However, the importance of avoiding such practice appears to be underestimated perhaps in light of the lack of…
The use of spreadsheets is widespread. Be it in business, finance, engineering or other areas, spreadsheets are created for their flexibility and ease to quickly model a problem. Very often they evolve from simple prototypes to…
The ability to detect when a system undergoes an incipient fault is of paramount importance in preventing a critical failure. Classic methods for fault detection (including model-based and data-driven approaches) rely on thresholding error…
Non-deterministically behaving (i.e., flaky) tests hamper regression testing as they destroy trust and waste computational and human resources. Eradicating flakiness in test suites is therefore an important goal, but automated debugging…
Java implementations of algorithms used by spreadsheets to automatically recompute the set of cells dependent on a changed cell are described using a mathematical model for spreadsheets based on graph theory. These solutions comprise part…
Most organizations use large and complex spreadsheets that are embedded in their mission-critical processes and are used for decision-making purposes. Identification of the various types of errors that can be present in these spreadsheets…
Spreadsheets are one of the most widely used programming environments, and are widely deployed in domains like finance where errors can have catastrophic consequences. We present a static analysis specifically designed to find spreadsheet…
Software debugging is a very time-consuming process, which is even worse for multi-threaded programs, due to the non-deterministic behavior of thread-scheduling algorithms. However, the debugging time may be greatly reduced, if automatic…
A new MS Excel application has been developed which seeks to reduce the risks associated with the development, operation and auditing of Excel spreadsheets. FormulaDataSleuth provides a means of checking spreadsheet formulas and data as…
Multi-threaded programs are expected to improve responsiveness and conserve resources by dividing an application process into multiple threads for concurrent processing. However, due to scheduling and the interaction of multiple threads,…
One of the most important assets of any company is being able to easily access information on itself and on its business. In this line, it has been observed that this important information is often stored in one of the millions of…
Fault localization has been determined as a major resource factor in the software development life cycle. Academic fault localization techniques are mostly unknown and unused in professional environments. Although manual debugging…
Debugging is considered as a rigorous but important feature of software engineering process. Since more than a decade, the software engineering research community is exploring different techniques for removal of faults from programs but it…
In this paper, we report some on-going focused research, but are further keen to set it in the context of a proposed bigger picture, as follows. There is a certain depressing pattern about the attitude of industry to spreadsheet error…
Spreadsheets are known to be error-prone. Over the last decade, research has been done to determine the causes of the high rate of errors in spreadsheets. This paper examines the added value of a spreadsheet tool (PerfectXL) that visualizes…
We propose a research strategy for creating and deploying prescriptive recommendations for spreadsheet practice. Empirical data on usage can be used to create a taxonomy of spreadsheet classes. Within each class, existing practices and…
Programmers often use an iterative process of hypothesis generation ("perhaps this function is called twice?") and hypothesis testing ("let's count how many times this breakpoint fires") to understand the behavior of unfamiliar or…
In this paper, we discuss the problem of the software engineering of a class of business spreadsheet models. A methodology for structured software development is proposed, which is based on structured analysis of data, represented as…
Previous research on spreadsheet risks has predominantly focussed on errors inadvertently introduced by spreadsheet writers i.e. it focussed on the end-user aspects of spreadsheet development. When analyzing a faulty spreadsheet, one might…